News and trends in BI and DW

It’s the third month of 2019 already! Can you believe it?! We can’t, the year seems to be flying by at pace.
In this newsletter, we’ve got a spotlight on chatbots as we have been implementing these for customers recently so are learning loads of new things we want to share with you. As always there’s a section on what’s happening in our community, so hope to see you at one of the upcoming events.
Ngā mihi,
Victoria.

What we’ve written

Spotlight on… Chatbots

You’ve probably experienced a chatbot on a website before, many provide basic answers to FAQs and not much more. Intelligent chatbots are a useful tool to extend the customer experience of your organisation.
Like building a website, the intrinsic personality of the chatbot needs to be designed – this involves digging into what their company personality is and how the chatbot can reflect that. Then we run a mini BEAM* session to collaboratively unearth the who, what, where, why, when and how questions the new chatbot will need to answer and dig into where the bot can become self learning to enhance the result set.
The team have been enjoying working with AWS LEX and have written a few blogs on their experiences recently, as you can see below.

Getting started with Amazon Lex

In this blog, our Senior Developer Ben Lee talks about his first go with this Chatbot technology and what he thinks about the basics vs customisation.

Meet Thomas

This is Thomas, an architect and data engineer, he loves to stand up quick, cost effective proofs of value for customers to help them realise the benefits of their existing assets, improve their productivity and open their eyes to fantastic visualisation opportunities.
Over the Christmas break Thomas went on a six week long journey in Fiordland, ticking off the Kepler, Hump Ridge, South Coast, Hollyford and Pyke River trails – staying in over 25 backcountry DOC huts along the way.
Connect with Thomas Evans on LinkedIn.

What’s happening

Have you seen this MongoDB Meetup? The first event is scheduled for 4 April with some of the MongoDB team visiting from Sydney, which means beer and pizza!

Qlik brought Attunity! Goes to show that no matter what you do with the data, “data in” is still the hardest part of the process.

Female Fuel’d Tech Talks is a Meetup group which looks to create an inclusive, collaborative and inspirational network for women in IT.

Our Director Shane Gibson’s blog on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms.

Wednesday April 3 from 5.15pm is the next NZ Data Science and Analytics Forum, book now.

Get Data Vault Certified! The next 3-day certification course is in Wellington on July 22-24 with earlybird pricing available until 31 May.

Have a great day,
~ OptimalBI.

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